Gordon has been sent to Coventry to launch Labour’s election campaign. Sky just trailed his arrival at Warwick University, he ignored the noise, but the you could clearly see the CCHQ coordinated protesters behind him stirring things up. The vacuous A Future Fair For All sounds familiar… Guido is sure Labour used it in 2005.

This email has been forwarded to Guido’s inbox this morning. CCHQ have put their campaigners on alert to a potential Lib Dem line of attack:

From: Mackintosh, David
Sent: 05 February 2010 09:46
To: All Battleground Directors; All Campaign Directors; All Regional Directors; All Regional Press Officers
Subject: PPCs who are councillors
Importance: High

Dear all,

For your information – I have received a number of e-mails regarding Freedom of Information requests submitted to councils requesting information on our councillors’ expenses where the councillor is also our PPC. The requests come from Tom Smithard who is based at Lib Dem HQ in Cowley Street. He is using a Googlemail account to request these and is using his private address and mobile number (xx Bxxxxx Axxxxx, Cxxxxxxx, Surrey SMX XXX / 07xxx xxx xxx)

Please let me know if you know of any instances where this has happened. Thanks to everyone who has already alerted me.

David

Tom Smithard (pictured) is Cowley Street’s grandly titled Parliamentary Campaigns & Intelligence Analyst and it seems he has rattled the Tories. The holier than thou Liberals are attempting to drag candidates into the expenses scandal before they are even MPs. Doing it covertly through personal email addresses even though an FOI request is an FOI request wherever it comes from.

Cowley Street better hope CCHQ don’t retaliate with some FOI requests concerning their PPCs and intriguing leaflet printing financing.

CCHQ get immensely annoyed when stories leaked from Millbank appear on this blog. Before Christmas George Osborne told a staff briefing that they may enjoy “ten minutes of fame” but leaks (and he named Guido in particular) could blow the whole election campaign.  Guido took that as a compliment.

The minor revelation on this blog that ballot papers will not have “David Cameron’s Conservatives” on them, a much mooted and trialled idea, has resulted in chief whip Patrick McLoughlin wading in.  At the Ashcroft / Cameron Tory PPC get-together this weekend the Chief Whip took the stage. He displayed the story on an overhead projector during a talk about loyalty. They’ll have to try harder than that to silence Guido, several PPCs got in touch to laugh about it…

Guido always protects his sources. The proof: when Downing Street threatened a security investigation, they got nothing.  Injunctions get filed in the bin, Court Orders get flouted, mole hunts end up in a hole.  To quote Rick Astley, Guido is “never gonna give you up.”

Rachel Sylvester writes…

“Meanwhile, like new Labour with its red-rose pagers in the 1990s, Conservative HQ shows growing signs of control-freakery as party managers attempt to contain the message. Frontbenchers must provide a list of all lunches that they have with journalists and are forbidden to do unauthorised interviews.”

Labour has an iPhone App scheduled for release in early February.  Dithering is not the preserve of Downing Street, the digital team admit they have yet to finalise the specification.

They want it to sync to local campaign events using GPS and postcode data, have a mobile version of their Virtual Phone Bank enabling a user to phone target voters plus have linkage into Facebook and Twitter.

With Labour’s record on IT projects Guido will bet it over-runs on cost and doesn’t work properly…

UPDATE : A Tory source says sniffily “We’ll announce our app when it is ready for release”.  The LibDems are experimenting with tin cans and string.

CCHQ has officially ditched the much mooted idea of putting “David Cameron’s Conservatives” on the ballot paper. The idea was trialled at the disastrous Ealing Southall by-election of 2007 and candidates were speculating as to whether it would be included at the general election.

A memo from CCHQ sent out this morning to PPC’s tells them to drop Dave:

From: Dolley, Mike
Sent: 19 January 2010 10:17
To: All Battleground Directors; All Campaign Directors; All Regional Directors
Cc: Mabbutt, Alan; Oldham, Rachel
Subject: candidate description

Please note that it has been determined that the agreed candidate description for all parliamentary and local government candidates will be “The Conservative Party Candidate” (Scotland and Wales please ignore)

Michael Dolley
Deputy Director
Field Campaigning Department

Labour are determined to make attacks on Cameron central to an increasingly Guidoised election campaign, and it seems PPCs are going to be spared some connection to that. Dave is still the Tories strongest asset though, which is why Labour are so keen to throw the kitchen sink at him. Labour would have made issue of it if his name had been included on the ballot and they will no doubt claim some kind of victory now that it won’t be…

Hearing backroom speculation last week when former Shadow Cabinet member Peter Ainsworth announced his resignation from the green benches. A pre-emptive scandal stopper? Or was did he realise just realise his face didn’t fit and he might as well go load his pockets in the real world? Or was it more cynical than that?

Yesterday John Maples, another Tory big wig, Deputy Party Chairman no less, announced his desire to step down at the next election. His expenses weren’t great – Guido is pretty sure Maples private members club is not his main home, but both he and Ainsworth would easily be returned to Westminster in May. Neither  made any noise about stepping down until the announcements came out of the blue. Interestingly CCHQ amended the rules on candidate selection to come into force on the January 1. After that date Team Dave have full control over candidate selection and can pop any on-message box-ticker wherever a safe seat comes up. Guido hears there are more gray haired Tories keen to step down but yet to announce. Has a deal been done with MPs stepping down that they would make the announcement in the new year…   Arise Lords Maples and Ainsworth?

UPDATE : ConservativeHome’s Tim Montgomerie doesn’t think it true. Guido reckons there is a good chance there will be more.

Guess why Lord Strathride turned up to the CCHQ phone banking launch party last week:

Seems Pickles is rather fond of the CCHQ receptionist too…

CCHQ is watching developments with a mixture of excitement and fear.  The last thing they want is to see Gordon ousted before the election…

Guido strongly believes that one of the strategic calculations made by the Tories that determined their decision to start the election campaign on Monday was to deliberately make it more difficult to dump Gordon. It would be argued internally in the Labour Party, Tory strategists hoped, that they couldn’t dump Gordon in the middle of an election campaign.  It was not as if Clarke’s crew hadn’t clearly signalled at Christmas their intention to make one last attempt to oust Brown…

Back in 2008 after a few bruising PMQs when Gordon was looking wobbly, Team Cameron deliberately pulled their punches for fear of destabilising Gordon too early before an election.  They know that their best hope of a landslide is if Gordon leads the Labour Party to a crushing defeat at the general election.  Gordon will cost Labour MPs their marginal seats which could be otherwise be saved with any other Labour leader…

In yet another attempt to rattle Labour with how much money they have, the Conservatives have rolled out yet another poster campaign. This time featuring a giant airbrushed Cameron. Guido was particularly tickled to see that one of these giant billboard posters have been bought outside the entrance to News International’s headquarters in Wapping.  This morning streams of Times and Sun hacks had to walk past a giant Dave begging for their affection.  Subtle.